Carll Burr

2021 · Education

If you took someone from 75 years ago and put them in a time machine to our current day in 2021, what industry in America would you see no progression in, for the most part? The answer is education (and government, but one at a time). We can all agree people have been talking a lot about how the education system is broken the past 30 years, but have we really stopped to think about how or why we say that? I started saying it myself a couple of years ago after a run-in with a local school district and an underprivileged student who was going to be left behind, but I couldn't put my finger on what exactly was broken. There are many great teachers out there. One of my best friends is one of them and I have nothing but respect for teachers who show up for our kids. The problem is so vast that even great teachers can't overcome the shackles the education system has become for both students and educators.

A few years ago I began to study education and it opened my eyes to a much more significant problem than I had anticipated. School is not helping our youth. Data has shown it is in fact hurting them. Why? There are many variables, but as parents we want our children to be independent thinkers. Many studies have now shown the key to fulfillment in life is living a life of impact. When you live a life of impact, you gain purpose, and when you gain purpose and are impacting others you gain something called joy. A word used mainly only during holidays, I'm afraid. Happiness and joy are vastly different things. Happiness is fleeting, but joy is often permanent. It is a mindset that doesn't go away when things are hard. On that note, there has been a dangerous philosophy preached the past 20 years that a good life is a comfortable life and you should do whatever makes you feel good. This is incorrect, and if we want our students to ultimately get to joy, which I imagine we all do as parents, it will take impact and it will be hard. Why am I focusing on impact and joy? Because we cannot create independent-thinking students who want to live joyful lives of impact in their communities and beyond in this current system. It is impossible. More schooling at the best universities in the world will not fix the problem either. In some or even many cases it will in fact exacerbate it.

A quote from John Taylor Gatto in "Dumbing Us Down": "I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequence, the age segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior." For context, Gatto was a New York educator for 30 years and won NYC Teacher of the Year three times. The year he won both NYC and New York State Teacher of the Year is when he quit and started trying to evoke change in our broken system.

Salman Khan, who many of you know from Khan Academy, wrote in "The One World Schoolhouse": "from the student's perspective, only by taking responsibility does true learning become possible." And as Elon Musk put it, "Don't confuse schooling with education. I didn't go to Harvard but the people that work for me did."

So what does this mean? It means we are doing it wrong. We have taken away creativity and independent thinking in the classroom. We have taken away the ability for a student to work with older and younger students, to mentor younger students and learn from their peers. We have made systems in which we tell students what to learn and when, have taken personal responsibility and freedom away from them, and have used bells to tell our students to turn off their brains even when they are in deep work they care about. We have taken our youth away from their families for most of their lives, and we have even gone so far as to tell students to stop pursuing areas they may want to flourish in because it is not in the curriculum. Part of the reason is why the education system was developed and for what purpose. Look up Horace Mann and you will see phrases like "instruments for the scientific management of a mass population." Schools were not created to develop independent thinkers. So what do we do about it?

In my case, I joined forces with the brightest people I have ever worked with, and they created a school for my kids to go to. A school where students are challenged to think creatively with enormous freedom, to begin learning how to make decisions on their own, find their passions and pursue them, start businesses, write books, be personally responsible for their time, be allowed to fail, have their families involved, and make school as much real life as humanly possible. There is so much more to write about, but my hope is this article got you thinking a little about our education system and how desperately we need change. Our youth have been disrespected for far too long. District Christian Academy is unlike any learning environment I have seen, and I believe it will help develop students who are independent thinkers living joyful lives of impact in their communities and beyond. My hope is this type of education spreads and joy becomes synonymous with school again. Thank you for reading.

Originally published as a monthly guest column in the Folsom Telegraph (Gold Country Media), Northern California.

February 11, 2021 · Technology & Society

Today I would like to speak about one of the more destructive forces inside your phone, and across pretty much all media devices, that you might not know is harming you significantly. You fall victim to it daily and have most likely had major arguments as a result of this invisible force. It literally tears families apart, ends long-lasting friendships, and seems to have erased all the grey areas in our lives that used to exist. While you have probably heard the term filter bubbles, you probably don't know how much they affect your everyday life. I call it a force because filter bubbles do not evoke enough attention, and I really don't know what else to call it, since "invisible algorithmic editing of the web" doesn't flow particularly well.

The term filter bubble was coined by Eli Pariser, an executive, activist, and author who introduced it in an excellent TED talk in 2011. It refers to the results of the algorithms that dictate what we encounter online. Pariser said those algorithms create "a unique universe of information for each of us, which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information." In layman's terms, which is what I need to understand any of this, it means your devices send you things that will resonate with you and that you will agree with. Your device has studied you and decides what gets in and what gets edited out. A Google search for me will give very different results from what you are looking at. A news feed for a conservative will be essentially the opposite of a liberal's. We have all heard this by now, but I want you to know this is a really big problem, and I'll do my best to explain why.

Have you ever had a conversation with a relative or friend recently and walked away thinking, "how could they be so blind? Do they really believe that?" I'd bet every single person reading this has had that experience, probably today if you scrolled social media at all. Have you ever stopped to think that this person you disagree with has always been a rational person? Maybe someone you respect, and now all of a sudden you can't believe they side differently than you do on a hot topic. Maybe a person who never used to believe in conspiracy theories is now arguing with you about one. Or perhaps it is you who now believes in things you used to not believe in. Why?

You have probably noticed that all the information in your devices seems to push the same side of a topic, a side you happen to agree with. Doesn't it seem odd you never see the other side in your feed? Maybe you read 50 articles a day that all agree with you and feel very well informed. Why would that be a problem? That is exactly what makes this force so hard. You are informed and can argue your point well because you have been emboldened by your feeds. But even if you are incredibly informed, it does not mean you are right. The same thing is happening to your friend who takes the opposite stance, and he or she will argue their point forever too. It is an unwinnable scenario we all find ourselves in if things don't change. There is a reason we have never seen so much divisiveness on so many issues in our country. There is a reason the grey area has disappeared. The real problem is that we are always right, according to our phones, and that is a really bad thing. It is bad for us as individuals, as parents, as coworkers, and especially for those of us who lead in any capacity.

Pariser writes: "Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead we're more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we're being offered parallel but separate universes." We don't currently decide what goes into our phones or what gets edited out, and algorithms have no integrity, ethics, or moral code like we do. Pariser was sounding the alarm in 2011 and said we need to see the rules that determine what gets through our filters. Guess what has changed since then? Nothing.

This problem will not get better soon, so I want to ask you to look at yourself for a second, and at all your convictions, and ask whether they are rational. Are they morally sound? Are they ethical? Sit back and ask yourself these questions, and if something feels a little wrong with the way you are siding on a subject, it most likely is. I have had to change my stance on several issues because of my own filter bubble trap and this rational, moral, ethical test. When I started looking at the other side, my reality literally changed.

I don't have the answer to this incredible problem, but at least I can hopefully get you to think about it a little. Maybe the next time you want to tell someone how wrong they are, you can remember that they are still your friend, family member, or colleague, and that they are most likely in the same filter bubble trap we are all in. Maybe get past your convictions and listen to the other side for a second. Chances are you have barely read anything on the other side, and you might even learn something. Thank you for reading.

Originally published as a monthly guest column in the Folsom Telegraph (Gold Country Media), Northern California.

2020 · Youth & Wellbeing

A note before you read: this column discusses youth mental health and suicide. Handle placement with care.

While everyone is bracing to see what happens next regarding the election, I feel there is a group of people who have barely been considered during this tumultuous time. A group I would argue is the most important in our society and needs our attention. A group that is our future and yet has been treated as an afterthought in 2020. Our kids, while they cannot vote yet, have been left out of the conversation, and they are the ones hurting the most. Yes, we have spoken about schools reopening, but what about one of the largest crises our country has ever faced, a crisis that has only grown worse alongside the coronavirus? Our youth are hurting and harming themselves at a rate not even close to anything in human history. Why isn't this being screamed about more?

We have seen the stats. I have mentioned studies in past articles showing teenage girls are taking their lives at over twice the rate now in 2020 as in 2008. But stats don't make you feel what is happening. One young man or woman deciding they no longer want to be on this Earth, the place I never want to leave, is heartbreaking. Think of the weight of helplessness a young mind must endure to reach that point. A lot of our kids are there now, despite what they are showing on Instagram and Snapchat. Our kids are lost. I apologize for writing about such a heavy topic, but it is one that weighs on my heart. I work with our youth a lot, and I see what they are facing. We all know phone and social media consumption has something to do with why kids are so sad. We know it makes us adults sad at times too. What do we do?

I certainly don't know the full answer, and the best I can think of is to write little articles that hopefully help a few people stop and think for a minute. I think that may actually be part of the answer. Maybe we can just stop and think about how we are going about our day. Something fascinating I stumbled on in 2018, when I was working on an app to help with cell phone addiction, was this: I began interviewing C-level business leaders and asked them a simple question. "What was your favorite family vacation?" Every single answer involved being in the woods or on a beach with essentially zero technology. Most answers involved being off the grid to some degree. I have since asked many more people of all ages that same question, and guess what the answer has been for every single one? Not 80 percent. Every single person, and we are well over 50 now. Every single kid and adult said their favorite family vacation was in nature and off of technology. Every single one.

We need to connect with one another without technology. Many of those favorite-vacation stories were a mess and were not even meant to be off the grid, but they all ended up that way. From RV trips gone bad that turned into exactly what the family needed, to places where an executive dad couldn't work because there was no reception, every story involved a family stuck together with little to no technology. I am a simple man and even I figured this one out. We need to take time with our family off our devices.

I lived for six months in the poorest country in the world, in West Africa, and the one thing I came back to America perplexed by was why their kids were so much happier than ours. It's easy to see why if you step back. It was because they had each other. They did not have technology and distractions all around them. Yes, they had real distractions like getting clean water and food, but not the fabricated ones we have here. These people were not a little bit happier than us. Witnessing that kind of life up close, and the happiness within it, changed my life when I got back to America.

Why am I writing this to you? To encourage you to take something from this small local article and from my experiences and do something with it. Plan a trip with your family where you disconnect. If you don't plan for it, chances are you won't do it. Holidays are coming, and I can't wait. For a short stretch of the year people are a little friendlier and families are a little closer. Take a moment to hug your kids. Tell them how important they are to you. I don't care if they are 18 or 23, they need it. Get away from the devices this season and talk about life. Take leadership of your house and lead your kids by example. Let's make our kids know how important they are to us, because I can promise you, a lot of them don't feel it right now. Thank you for reading, and happy holidays.

Originally published as a monthly guest column in the Folsom Telegraph (Gold Country Media), Northern California.

2021 · Family & Leadership

We as human beings are short-term thinkers and always have been. I would argue that now, in this instant-gratification world, we have become even shorter-term thinkers than our ancestors. We need to take a second and think about the long-term effects our daily interactions have on our daughters. To all the dads out there with daughters, please read this. I had a realization recently that changed my life: my five-year-old daughter needs my unconditional love more than anyone else on earth.

I could quickly say that a father's relationship with his daughter is a significant factor in a woman's self-esteem, social traits, academic success, behavior, body image, expectations for how she should be treated later in life, and partner selection, all of which are true, without a reader batting an eye, because we have hopefully heard this before. But would you believe the father-daughter relationship is so significant that it actually impacts the age at which a young woman goes through puberty, and the age at which she starts having sex? Study after study has shown this, and the results have been repeated and verified. A National Center for Biotechnology Information study states that "the father-daughter relationship, in particular, has been the focus of much research, with warmer relationships, characterized by emotional support and consistency, associated with delayed pubertal maturation, monogamy, and heavy maternal investment." I won't get into the causes, which involve cortisol and a lot of things I barely understand, but the effect is shocking and something we need to notice.

We as dads live in a world where we are constantly connected to work. It can be stressful, and I have written before about how important it is to get the phone, device, and computer away when spending time with our kids, even if only for a 10-minute break. It is imperative we show them they are the most important part of our lives when we are with them, now more than ever, because of how distracted our lives have become. Quality undistracted time matters more than distracted time, regardless of how long it is.

When you walk in from work, or step out of your office for a break, how do you interact with your kids? I remember my dad always being on this huge portable telephone when I was a kid, because he was the CEO of Prudential Realty in Long Island and was always busy. It made me sad at times, because I wanted to feel more important than work. I think it is fair to say we have all felt that a little. The good thing for me is it was the early 90s, and he didn't have that phone at my games and was able to be present a lot. What about now? How often are we making our kids feel less important than work? We can always justify it by saying we work to buy the things our kids have, but guess who doesn't actually care that much? Our daughters do not care how many hundreds of thousands of dollars we made while they were growing up. There is even a child flourishing index that looks at the happiness of children around the world, and America isn't in the top 25. There are 37 countries ahead of us, and a lot of it has to do with how we work and prioritize life here. Having lived in the poorest country on earth in West Africa in 2014 and 2015, I can tell you money and things have very little to do with happiness. Those were the happiest children I have ever had the pleasure of spending time with.

All our children want, especially our daughters, is our affection, love, and attention. That is it. And what do we give them less of than ever? Our affection, love, and attention. This is where I failed last night. I snapped at that little girl who wanted what should be expected from her dad. Think of the last time your daughter came into your office for something trivial while you were busy, and how you spoke to her. Now imagine watching that interaction as a bystander, seeing that five- or six-year-old looking for attention and watching how you spoke to her. Your heart would break for that little girl walking away feeling rejected. Why don't we see it that way when we are the one speaking to her?

We don't have a lot of time left to build our little girls up. My daughter is five and a half, and now that I know I directly impact how quickly she grows up and how confident she will be down the road, I can promise you I will not be a short-term thinker when it comes to her. She is too important. Be the dad who builds up his daughter. Be the dad who gives her the confidence to want to find someone like you down the road. Be the dad who does everything he can to show his daughter she is the most precious human being in the world. Thank you for reading.

Originally published as a monthly guest column in the Folsom Telegraph (Gold Country Media), Northern California.

2020 · Technology & Stillness (Faith)

In today's article I am going to go a little off topic with regard to social media. Some of you will enjoy it and some will not. My ask is that you read it with an open mind. I truly feel this topic ties right into the social media and instant-gratification feedback loop so many of us are stuck in. Apathy is our biggest enemy right now, and a lot of it comes from the constant feeding of useless noise into our brains. We do not let ourselves get bored anymore, and we are therefore not thinking deeply the way we used to. This article is about apathy and, wait for it, God.

It has become the norm to feel we are too smart for God, or perhaps that we just don't have time for Him anymore. This is where the distracted nature of our lives comes into play, and it is significant. We feel that way until we are actually in the face of death. Many of you reading this have probably looked at death recently, with a family member, a friend, or even yourself. That is often where you get the most clarity about your priorities. In the trenches is where you learn about yourself. The point of this article is not to argue the reasons for belief in God, and it is not a theological debate, so please don't focus on denomination, because it does not matter here. What matters is whether you have stopped to think about it lately, and if so, whether you are making time for quiet to think about it often.

We have lost sight of the significance of our individual relationship with God. This has nothing to do with your church, your bible study, what your parents taught you, or what anyone else taught you. It has nothing to do with whether you have been a Christian for 50 years or know the Bible inside and out. It has to do with you and only you and your creator. I am not asking you specifically; I am posing a question to think about. This may sound strange if you are not religious, but I have good news: you don't have to be. I am bringing it up because I want the reader to take something tangible from this, something to help handle the massive amount of distraction and information constantly pushed at us. We need to get good at being quiet and bored again so we can think about what is truly important.

A lot of people have misconceptions about what prayer is. They think it is a structured thing where you have to speak a certain way and say certain things. I fell into that same boat. What I am asking you to do is simply take some time to think. Don't be apathetic toward one of the most important questions in your life. Try getting quiet and listening, away from your devices. As a Marine, we spent a lot of time training tactically on how to close with and destroy the enemy. But what if we rehearsed and trained all the time and never actually practiced shooting? Would that make sense? Of course not. So why do so many of us say we believe in God but never practice being quiet with Him?

That is the point of this article. Perhaps it is the first time, or maybe just a reminder, to be still. You need quiet away from your devices, and there is no better way to find it than stillness and reflection. There is no way to build a relationship if you never take the time to try. I know this one is a little off topic, but I feel it is important, and I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for reading.

Originally published as a monthly guest column in the Folsom Telegraph (Gold Country Media), Northern California.